Will subscriptions to
/. be the downfall? I believe it is possible, not necessarily likely, but possible.
I've only been reading /. for a couple of months. I didn't wait long to create a user account because I saw the obvious benefit. Now that I've been reading for a while, and posting a little, I realized that being one of the first few to post is important. Otherwise the moderators never see your post at the bottom of the list. Further other readers are not as likely to look at the bottom of 100+ messages.
How does this relate to the down fall of /.? Well it appears that /. is allowing paid subscribers to read and comment on articles before the rest of us. Hey, it seems like a good idea to me, financially.... But is it really good for /.? I don't think so; here's why. Most are not willing to pay for subscriptions for a site that can easily be considered a tertiary new source (i.e. the actual events are primary sources, the other news sites are secondary sources, /. is the tertiary source). Not that I'm trying to belittle the value of /. It is nice to have all the subjects, in which I'm interested, collected for me and a running commentary to go with it. But, not enough to pay for a subscription.
But the downfall of /., I'm only joking right? No, ultimately others, like I have done, will realize that only subscribers are practically allowed to participate. There are just too many comments to a given story before I'm allowed to participate. So I move on. Yah, I might consider reading the /. RSS feed from somewhere else just to keep up with the news. But I completely abandon the idea of participating.
So, if /. can get enough paid subscribers so that it continues to have a truly diverse group of contributors, it will succeed. I think it is inevitable that non-subscribers will no longer even try to contribute. If /. does not get enough paid subscribers, that will be the downfall of /.
